Patient Care

As this wave of the coronavirus starts to slow, I can’t help but notice that many of the people still getting infected are those who don’t have the luxury of distance—those who, by necessity or [...]

Among the patients I care for at the hospital is a young woman recovering from covid-19. To keep her blood oxygenated, she needs a device called a non-rebreather mask. The mask is connected by a [...]

A woman and her husband are admitted to my ward; before the coronavirus, they were healthy, enjoying morning walks and evening cocktails. Now, while her breathing improves each day, his declines. [...]

Almost certainly, the density of New York City has played a major role in the spread of the coronavirus. While it circulated among us, millions of New Yorkers touched the same subway turnstiles [...]

Right now, the most striking feature of the hospital might be the difference between the world outside and the world within. Outside, New York—America’s largest and densest city—is a ghost town. [...]

As a physician who cares for hundreds of patients with heart failure every year, I’m frequently humbled when, despite my best efforts, patients shuttle between hospital and home. I track the [...]

Despite the pervasiveness of regret, doctors often overlook it. We often don’t explore the role regret might be playing in the distress many patients and families experience, or acknowledge it [...]

It was the most important thing I would do that week. One morning, I walked around the hospital introducing myself to patients. I stopped by the room of a woman in her late 80s with dementia. Her [...]

In 1905, a Boston-based physician named Richard Cabot decided that medicine could do more to meet the social needs of patients. With his own money, he hired a nurse, Garnet Pelton, who began to [...]

How should you live when you know you’re going to die? It is perhaps the ultimate, eternal question — one we all have to grapple with, but mercifully, don’t have to, until the end is crystallized [...]